This invention relates to an apparatus for manufacturing semiconductors, and more particularly to a Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE) apparatus with improved productivity.
Heretofore, there has been known a MBE apparatus of the type having an loading chamber, a transfer chamber and a growth chamber, wherein the loading chamber is connected to the transfer chamber through a vacuum connection such as gate valves for taking substrates into the apparatus from the outside atmosphere. The transfer chamber is disposed between the loading chamber and the growth chamber for transferring the substrates to the last mentioned chamber in which a thin film is formed on the surface of each substrate. Also, there has been known another type of MBE apparatus, for instance as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,201,152, in which no transfer chamber is provided and thereby its loading chamber is connected to a growth chamber through gate valves. In the MBE apparatus having either construction described above, however, the utilization efficiency of each portion thereof is low, for example, because the loading chamber is not used for a relatively long period of time when the growth chamber is used to form a thin film on the surface of each substrate and that evacuation of the loading chamber is commenced after the substrates have been introduced into the chamber, and thus no consideration has been given to the productivity of the apparatus.